A mature approach

Enterprise project management (EPM) is among the fastest growing solutions in the marketplace, with Microsoft turning over more than $500 million in the previous financial year in this arena. While being rapidly adopted and widely regarded as a stable and mature product, one has to question whether organisations are as "ready" as they think to ensure a successful EPM investment.

Sound methodology structures project administration, removes managerial uncertainty and directs the team towards work that adds direct value to the project. One would think that with a tried and tested product, backed up with sound project management methodology, implementation success is a given. Not so. Organisations overlook the impact their own maturity levels have on the success of an EPM solution.

Press and analyst attention has been focused on the severity of project failure lately. If performance cannot be measured, improvement, planning or implementation of the appropriate projects becomes difficult. Clear objectives must be defined against which performance can be measured. The process of implementing a formal EPM solution will immediately leverage most companies to a greater level of maturity, but according to a recent US study, fewer than 5% of companies have maturity levels high enough to fully exploit the functionality of EPM.

The level of maturity within an organisation is determined through a number of factors, including:

* The people within the organisation, their understanding of project management principles and their commitment to following the processes.
* The processes and how well they are documented, implemented and measured to ensure the correct steps are taken to achieve the desired outcomes.
* The technology in place to manage the processes and people, extending beyond the EPM solution to also incorporate workflow, document repositories, etc.
* The organisation itself, including its change management abilities.

Organisations need to define and measure themselves in terms of each of these criteria. PM Solutions` commonly accepted Project Management Maturity Model defines five levels of maturity against which an organisation can benchmark itself and plan maturity improvement goals. It is frightening to discover that 89% of organisations exist within the base level one where a common project language is used within the organisation, but even basic disciplined processes are not found to be in place. Through consistency and predictability, common processes (level two) are established, slowly enabling them to define a singular methodology (level three) and apply benchmarks (level four) against which project success can be measured.

Level five, the optimum level of organisational maturity to ensure project success, relies on a predictable set of processes and defined benchmarks, against which the organisation drives change and improvement.

An appalling statistic shows that 84% of companies do not create business cases for any of their IT projects, or perhaps only provide a business case for selected ones. In addition, 89% of businesses have no metrics in place for evaluating project success once they are complete, other than financial measures that clearly leave out too many other variables. Without this information, organisations cannot begin to evaluate their projects and therefore their business position.

Press and analyst attention has been focused on the severity of project failure lately.

Dries van der Colff, Technical director, Fulcrum Business Solutions.

According to the Collins concise dictionary, `planning` assumes there is a defined objective; and objective by definition assumes there is a clear goal or aim. Surely goals cannot be realised unless there is an accurate assessment of an organisation`s current position in the market. Profitability alone is not the only scorecard requiring improvement. Leaders in project management are addressing project maturity issues such as building effective teams; managing risks; capitalising failures into assets; communicating the vision without ambiguity and ultimately putting passion into work profile to convert vision into reality and abstract into concrete.

A mature company approach to projects includes clearly defined goals, a defined senior sponsor, a phased project approach and project champions. Many projects fail because they don`t align with a company`s strategic focus. Maturity ensures systems and processes are in place to keep any new projects in line with the company`s overall goals - key to a project`s success.

The payback of EPM can be substantial. Current market research and statistics further validate this: improvements in the order of 20% in project/process execution, 15% in productivity, 15% in time to market and an overall return on investment of 25% were noted by the companies surveyed. Simply, EPM enables companies to align people and projects with the strategic objectives for business growth and efficiency. Only when business strategies, infrastructure and project mindset are integrated in a mature environment, however, can organisations hope to achieve these improvements.